The past six years have revealed a growing darkness at the heart of the United States' Executive Branch, wrapped in a cloak of deepening disarray and protected by an almost armor-clad circle of corruption & collusion that only recently the true depths of the decay have become apparent.  We are on the verge of one of the most heinous acts of aggression that can be imagined.  The path we've walked en route to this point, while often dark and treacherous, has not gone totally unnoticed.  We have had our glimpses, here and there, and heard the growing howls of discontent amid warnings of danger ahead.  It's time that we stopped and reflected upon those warnings.  We need to act to change our course, if we are to save our nation and ourselves.  

Let's review, shall we?

The recent diary "They Want to Hit Iran" by jorndorff on DailyKos reiterates and forewarns of the impending expansion of hostilities by the US against the Middle East.  Please read it.

This was ~not~ the first time we've heard warnings about the inevitability -- in spite of the rhetoric to the contrary -- of such a strike, nor is it the first time that the spectre of nuclear war has manifested in the form of a "precision tactical strike".  Jorndoff does an excellent job of explaining the internal "neo-justification" of the why & how such a plan could be considered viable by our criminally-inclined leadership.   And for a great summation of just how "awry" this Administration has gone, and the underlying ideo-theology behind it, check out "Pentagon insider speaks:  NeoCons LIED early and as often as possible." by Yellow Canary.  

Given the grave nature of the situation, and the quickly diminishing timeframe in which we can act to avert disaster, I'd like to briefly recap my take and suggestions.  With any luck, we can interrupt this ongoing danse macabre before Iran's dance card is punched.

First, a little history.

After the "selection" of 2000 but before George W. Bush and the neoconservative cabal invaded the house at 1600, I was engaged in discussion with others who, like me, believed we were on an imminent course to invade Iran.  After 9/11, watching the draconian measures that "just happened" to be ready to plop into place materialize and pass Congress under the guise of a "Patriot" Act, we were certain.  I was walking through a bar during the Colin Powell address to the UN, and -- when he spoke the line about Iraq attempting to get significant quantities of yellowcake -- I stopped in my tracks.  The look of complete surprise on my face as I turned to face the nearest television must have matched the looks I received from the patrons when I blurted out "He just lied!"  I left quickly, but was not happy to realize that this Administration was willing to so completely lie and misdirect.  I watched glumly as the propaganda machine went into full swing, stewing silently.

(image found @http://www.transtopia.org)

As time went on, I became more active online.  I participated more in political discussions -- something I'd formerly avoided, as I rarely found politicians or political activists who weren't spinning a particular pet project.  I felt that something was missing, and quickly met a few friends who felt similarly.  We worked with a group of folks from all over the internet -- and across several party lines -- to begin to fight back against the propaganda.  We helped to write the "Ten Characteristics of a True US Patriot" when the GOP started their smear campaign against those who spoke out for truth, justice, and our Constitutional rights.  Although time and circumstance continued to pass, and the folks at USPatriotsUnited were forced into a temporary hiatus (they are now regrouping, and will resume their work by the end of the month), I saw little to no improvement in the way our national consciousness was shaping up.

Then the leaks began.

The patriotic whistleblowers who began to step forward, some publicly and some anonymously, provided a few sharp sticks with which to poke our groggy nation into a heightened state of alert.  A state not of fear -- the neocons and theocrats were handling that -- but of danger.  The danger of letting our Constitutionally protected rights and freedoms slide inexorably into the mists of history.  

We've watched as more and more scandals unfold.  The realities of a culture of corruption and a coalescence of conspiracies -- not tin-foil-hat quality, but genuinely prosecutable conspiracies -- began to unfold.  The leaks increased.  And I predicted (and still predict) that there will be more leaks, with more concrete evidence to further nail down the malfeasance of this administration, in the near future. The appearance of General Anthony Zinni on Meet the Press on April 2 is one good example (see it here). The article by Seymour Hersh in the New Yorker, which came out three days after this article first appeared, is another, which was quickly followed by a confirmation article in the Washington Post (reported here, by adigal on DailyKos).  Sharon Jumper's DailyKos diary "General calling on other officers to speak out" regarding Lt. General Gregory Newbold's article in Time illustrates a fourth.   The tightly-wound serpent that has enfolded our national leadership within its coils has begun to loosen its grip, and the nation is beginning to breath once again.  But it's not enough.

The first "red flag" regarding the frightening prospect that the Bush Administration may actually have the intent to use nuclear weapons against Iran leapt to the attention of many people with the publication of the August 1 issue of "The American Conservative" that featured a brief blurb call "Deep Background" regarding some changes by Vice President Cheney:

August 1, 2005 Issue -- Copyright © 2005 The American Conservative

Deep Background
In Washington it is hardly a secret that the same people in and around the administration who brought you Iraq are preparing to do the same for Iran. The Pentagon, acting under instructions from Vice President Dick Cheney's office, has tasked the United States Strategic Command (STRATCOM) with drawing up a contingency plan to be employed in response to another 9/11-type terrorist attack on the United States. The plan includes a large-scale air assault on Iran employing both conventional and tactical nuclear weapons. Within Iran there are more than 450 major strategic targets, including numerous suspected nuclear-weapons-program development sites. Many of the targets are hardened or are deep underground and could not be taken out by conventional weapons, hence the nuclear option. As in the case of Iraq, the response is not conditional on Iran actually being involved in the act of terrorism directed against the United States. Several senior Air Force officers involved in the planning are reportedly appalled at the implications of what they are doing--that Iran is being set up for an unprovoked nuclear attack--but no one is prepared to damage his career by posing any objections.
  

Immediately, dire warnings from several well-known colorful figures (read: tinfoil & edge-dweller alert) such as Lyndon LaRouche began circulating -- as early as July 27, 2005.  

On that date, LaRouche sent out a memo in the form of an international release that made reference to "Cheney's 'Guns of August'."  Jeffrey Steinberg published an expanded piece regarding the building backlash against the suspected plan on Rense.com, following up with a timeline of events on Executive Intelligence Review (EIR).

Found on the internet.+

While neither source is regarded as mainstream, the information and chronology have appeared to be rather accurate -- with the exception of the invasion that didn't happen.  My own personal take on the Iran Plan coincided more with Hersh -- earlier that year, he'd speculated that June was the probable timeframe for an attack. (Lost my link to the prior article that quoted Hersh...please provide in comemnts, and I will update.)  

Not everybody feels that a nuclear attack is a likely scenario.  Several have posted in various locations very logical, informative rejections of the premise that BushCo is doing anything other than sabre-rattling.  One excellent piece Turning down the volume on Iranian nuke attack by sedrunsic makes perfect sense, and a calm, reasoned presentation.  Under other circumstances, a reasoned response such as this would be the way to go.  But not so with BushCo.

Bush and the neoconservatives are following an agenda.  They've nearly accomplished it all, and they are hell-bent for leather in their push to complete it in their race against time.  They've had to shuffle some players around -- some changes were planned, some were not.  One of the most accomplished members of their team in the runup to the Iraq war, Paul Wolfowitz, was no longer at their side to help with the manipulation of information and suppression of dissent.  "Wolfie" had been a relentless champion of the Iraq war.  For an idea of just how effective, in addition to some good insight into how the Bush Team fights to stay on message, check out the article "Trigger Man" in The American Conservative magazine.  Here's a key excerpt, pertaining to the clash between Shineski and Wolfie:

In the months preceding the U.S.-led invasion, with the ranks of those opposing the administration swelling, Wolfowitz figured prominently among the officials called upon to rebut any objections to war. Never has a deputy cabinet secretary played such a visible role in making the case for a policy so fraught with controversy. Cool, imperturbable, and relentlessly "on message," Wolfowitz performed impressively. Only once did his mask of self-assurance slip: when the United States Army, in the person of its chief of staff, Gen. Eric Shinseki, ventured to say nay.

The clash between Shinseki and Wolfowitz received considerable media coverage. For some, it lives on as emblematic of the arrogance and over-confidence attributed to the Bush administration on the eve of war. But the full significance of this civil-military confrontation remains unappreciated. For Shinseki, an honorable soldier with few intellectual pretensions, was also in his own way the embodiment of specific forces, very much at odds with those that Wolfowitz had championed. Although couching his critique in green-eyeshade, bean-counting terms, the general set out to subvert the very project that represented the deputy defense secretary's life's work.

The administration, Shinseki told members of Congress, was badly underestimating the number of troops that pacifying Iraq was likely to require. Given that the requisite additional troops simply did not exist, Shinseki was implicitly arguing that the U.S. armed services were inadequate for the enterprise. Further, he was implying that invasion was likely to produce something other than a crisp, tidy decision; from a soldier's viewpoint, a display of precision warfare was not likely to settle the matter. "Liberation" would leave loose ends. Unexpected and costly complications would abound.

In effect, Shinseki was offering a last-ditch defense of the military tradition that Wolfowitz was intent on destroying, a tradition that saw armies as fragile, that sought to husband military power, and that classified force as an option of last resort. The risks of action, Shinseki was suggesting, were far, far greater than the advocates for war had let on.

Shinseki's critique elicited an immediate retaliatory response. One could safely ignore the complaints of liberal Democrats or the New York Times, not to mention those coming from a largely inchoate antiwar movement. But if the brass openly opposed the war, they could halt the march on Baghdad even before it began. Besides, how could Shinseki dare even to raise the question of an occupation? Wolfowitz was already on the record as declaring that the United States was "committed to liberating the people of Iraq, not to becoming an occupation force." Shinseki had to be discredited then and there, lest the opportunity to validate the new American way of war be lost forever.

(Emphasis mine.)  ...BushCo is relentless when it has a goal.  They have been planning a lot of this for a long, long time.  The recent revelations that the President authorized the declassification and release of select elements of the NIE pertaining to the Valerie Plame scandal -- another major blow to the Administration's veil of secrecy -- have also reopened another formerly dormant line of inquiry: Valerie Plame and the cover company Brewster Jennings were working directly on the possible flow in and out of Iran of anything related to WMD.  The leak that cost Plame her status also closed down the one source that may have been able to validate information regarding Iran's nuclear capability and timetable.  A good read on this can be found in the DailyKos diary "Let's not forget that Plame was tracking IRAN and nukes by clammyc.  Combined with the change in 2005 of the Pentagon's plan for using preemptive nukes, a move that GlobalSecurity.org said appeared to be suspiciously designed to support an attack against Iran, and it looks even more suspicious that a simple vendetta against Ambassador Joe Wilson and his initial revelation that the Niger yellow-cake fiasco appeared to be false -- a revelation that threatened to undermine the Iraq War justification.  Even more recently, an article emerged on March 31st that announced plans to conduct a penetration and fallout test for a simulated nuclear penetrator that will generate a mushroom cloud visible from Vegas.  Apparently, having fresh data to update the models for the battle that they aren't planning to fight (and then have to justify as well as deal with the fallout from) is a good thing.

From a recent WaPo edition. It appears that cartoonists have a good grasp of this Administration's myopic vision.

The Bush Administration has been moving steadily forward, following the path that they carefully planned.  They're winning in this game of dirty politics, even as their house of cards begins to crumble.  And the next item on the agenda is the strike against Iran.

We cannot take their words at face value regarding their intentions.  As the revelations regarding the Iran plan are exposed, and Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald slowly exposes ties all the way to the Presidency in the CIA Leak scandal, the WH spins frantically while intrepid reporters block the attempts to further obfuscate the facts and rewrite history.

I'd published a warning about trusting this Administration, and interrupting their goals of conquest, in the diary entitled On the importance of being earnest..., but it was relatively quick on the scrollby.  I cited quite a few references for it, all of which should still be good.  There are soooo many more items that can be listed as examples, too.  Here's the main nub of the gist:

Do we now stand by, and heed not the clarion calls that denote the dangers of allowing these international law breakers and war criminals to launch their next attack, emboldened by their artful dodging of accountability and responsibility, even in the face of their own inept failure to plan for and secure the peace?  Is it not, at this moment in time, inherently obvious that a plan to secure such a peace is not now, nor was it ever, intended?

Let us not stand idly by and permit this opportunity in the history of our nation, and indeed the world, pass us unanswered.  We must stand and oppose, on all counts, the ongoing attempts at escalation of hostilities into any new theater, for any reason, while the shadows of deception wield the reins in our nation's halls of power.

We must act now to prevent any further deception that could be used to attempt to justify further engagement in acts of war - and cowardice - that only serve to weaken our nation, divide our people, cripple our defenses, and spread chaos in the world through ill-conceived acts of might that flagrantly abuse those principles that we hold dear.

We are being drawn inexorably toward a precipice that we dare not fall into.

We have evidence of intentional deception, malfeasance, high crimes and misdemeanors on a scale never before conceived or measured in a nation founded upon ideals of freedom and justice for all.  We have seen the taint and corruption that supports this cancer, spreading through all our institutions and eroding our national spirit as well as our founding tenets - our strength, and our soul, as a nation.

We have compiled evidence that not only comprises the heart of a criminal conspiracy but also the artful implementation of unitary incompetence.

For added emphasis, I included a quote of particular significance -- Bush's own words from the runup to the invasion of Iraq:

Facing clear evidence of peril, we cannot wait for the final proof -- the smoking gun -- that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud.

I thought to myself, my, what a clever bird, to quote back the words that $1.6 billion (with a "B") of propaganda funding helped pay for.  Now, however, I repeat those words in this quote, haunted by the promise of self-fulfilling horror that they hold.  If we have learned but a single thing from watching this charade of leadership over the past six years, is the use of projection of their own criminal actions against their preselected targets in blatant confabulation not one of their most favorite tools?

In my February 19 entry called WARNING: Failsafe disengaged, I cautioned

We cannot permit these affronts to our nation, to our constitution, to our citizens and to the world to continue.

Bush is guided - sometimes kicking and screaming - by Cheney, Rove and other members of the NeoCon/PNAC/RRR cabal.  But remember - Cheney has his finger on the button by proxy.  And he just got away with shooting a 78 year old lawyer.

For his next trick, he's going to nuke a small Middle Eastern country.  This is our chance; this is our warning.

Do we heed it, or watch as our nation yet again engages in a heinous crime on the world stage, spreading the dangerous cancer that has already crippled our domestic policies and national health?

I wasn't practicing snark or seeking to be a Cassandra.  I am well and truly convinced that we are in dire circumstance -- second only to Iran, sitting in the extremely unenviable crosshairs of an Administration that is itching to pull the nuclear trigger.

All this leads me to repeat what I urged in my past diary entitled "Congress Must Revoke the 9/11 War Powers Authorization NOW (with Poll)" -- the Authorization to Use Military Force has got to be yanked.  It's the lynchpin to this headlong plunge down the tracks toward a deadman's curve, with the only the reality of a derailment promised at the bottom.  To quote the opening of that diary:

The time has come for Congress to suspend the 9/11 War Powers Authorization and retain the right to completely revoke it, pending a much-needed and long-overdue review of the performance of the Executive Branch in light of the many duplicitous statements as well as illegal actions. The mad grab for power must be slapped on the wrist, now, and a restraint imposed that removes one of the current convenient excuses for the abusive over-reach.

The likelihood of accomplishing such an objective in light of the current Republican-led Congress notwithstanding, all Congressfolk must propose and pass a suspension of the 9/11 War Powers Authorization. If the Republican majority denies the suspension, it must be forced to do so on a vote that records their names.

Get the recommendation on the table.  Call for accountability, and take names.

These names are the equivalent of "put up or shut up" -- where do folks in Congress stand now, and what are they willing to put their names to?  Do they well and truly support the nation, and intend to do their jobs?  Can they now step forward and begin to insist & ensure that they will, through their own names, be accountable for reinstating the oversight functions that have long been sidestepped in a danse macabre that we can no longer tolerate?

Or will the band play on?

This is Part I of a multipart series exposing this particularly gruesome Danse Macabre.  Stay tuned for the next piece.

+Image found in a collection.  Please leave a comment with proper identifying info so that it may be properly attributed.

UPDATE 4-11-2006: Check out Iran attack in the next "2 weeks?" by Florida Democrat. There are others who feel that this Administration intends to strike before November.